WD Red 3TB NAS Hard Drive Review

Benchmarking One Drive In A PC

HD Tune Pro 5.00 Benchmarking

HD Tune Pro 5.00 is an extended version of HD Tune which includes many new features such as write benchmark, secure erasing, AAM setting, folder usage view, disk monitor, command line parameters and file benchmark.

Read Performance Testing

Benchmark Results: The WD Red 3TB hard drive had an average read speed of 112.4MB/s with a burst speed of 345.3MB/s and an access time of 22.0ms. The read performance is fairly linear and started out at 112.4MB/s on the outer edges of the platters before slowing to 62.8MB/s on the inner sectors.

Write Performance Testing

Benchmark Results: The WD Red 3TB had an average write speed of 109.9 MB/s with a burst speed of 312.1 MB/s and an access time of 18.7ms. These are very good write performance numbers!

File Testing

Benchmark Results: The file benchmark results look good with ~150 MB/s writes for most file sizes over 16KB. The WD Red 3TB averaged around 27C when being moderatly used.

CrystalDiskMark v3.0.2c

CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds.

1000MB Files Test Benchmark:

Benchmark Results: The WD Red 3TB hard drive reached 153 MB/s read and 147 MB/s write in the sequential test. The 4K random read and write scores were around 1 MB/s, but that is common for a hard drive.

ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.47

ATTO is one of the oldest hard drive benchmarks that is still used today. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that you can easily interpret. The benchmark was run with file sizes from 0.5kb through 8192kb with the total length being 256mb.

Benchmark Results: The WD Red 3TB hard drive reached 163 MB/s read and 153 MB/s write in the benchmark test. Not bad performance numbers from a desktop hard drive that is meant to be inside of a NAS running a RAID array!

Speaking of a NAS…. Let’s try out five of these drives in RAID 5 in a real NAS server!